The man who fell to earth: Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon | Science | The Guardian Share on Messenger Close Buzz Aldrin has been on many journeys in his remarkable life, and in some respects the one to the moon was the least challenging. Being the second man to walk on the moon in July 1969, stepping down from the landing craft 20 minutes after Neil Armstrong, gave him eternal name recognition, but it also brought a heap of problems in the decade that followed - alcoholism, depression, two divorces. He was on the moon for two and a half hours; his post-Nasa breakdown lasted for a decade as he looked for something to fill the space left by ... space. But now, praise the Lord and Alcoholics Anonymous, 79-year-old Buzz is sitting in front of me, tanned, alert, as sharp as the Apollo 11 badge pinned to his colourful tie, chiding me for waving the mic around carelessly, telling a fan who is showing him his grandfather's 60s space scrapbook that he doesn't sign autographs, treading the careful divide between ego and generosity, self-regard and fellowship that is essence-of-Buzz.

Armstrong lives in near-seclusion at his Ohio farm, so Buzz - off the booze for 30 years - has come to represent the crazy glory of manned space travel, and is in London as part of a global mission to get us interested in space again. He's also flogging a book, Magnificent Desolation, which charts his rise, fall and return to equilibrium. Major Tom eventually made it back to Earth, and has quite a tale to tell. The key thing when interviewing Aldrin is not to get too technical. He is a man who would happily fill the entire hour with a discussion of docking manoeuvres. I also make the mistake of mentioning God - he secretly took communion moments after the module landed on the moon ("My soul didn't belong to Nasa," he says) - and he gives me an impenetrable 10-minute explanation of the evolution of his faith. He is nothing if not systematic, which is great for the meticulous planning of moon landings, less good for quick life surveys. But get him off technicalities and AA-style moral lessons, and he is far more articulate and engaging than most interviewers would have you believe.

He has always had problems putting into words the grandeur of that moment 40 years ago. "People want to know what it felt like," he says. "They want us in a few words to generate the enthusiasm that the world had as they contemplated what we were about to do. Well, what it felt like is something that we trained for. We were trying to treat it as calmly as we could and perform to the best of our ability. We tried to repress feelings of exuberance, of disappointment, and be proud and responsible people accomplishing the task that was given to us. That sounds kind of boring. Except that what we did was kind of earth-shaking." I ask him whether he was disappointed to be the second person to set foot on the moon. He tries to have it both ways. "We're dealing with very competitive people who always want to get the most out of the opportunities that come along, even though I did not relish the idea of speeches, celebrations and being on a pedestal as a hero. I didn't enter the space programme to want to do that.

Being first outside the spacecraft would bring much more responsibility, and I really wasn't looking for that." I press a little, and you can sense the 40 years of frustration at being labelled second. "I was continually being asked, 'Didn't it bother you?', and always being introduced as the second man on the moon. That is a degrading title right off the bat, instead of being a member of the first landing mission to reach the moon." What comes across most strongly in his description of the mission in the book is its black comedy - and the way that he, Armstrong and Michael Collins, who was orbiting the moon in the command module, really were flying on a wing and a prayer. Aldrin worries that he will close the hatch to the landing craft, locking out him and Armstrong and condemning them to a slow, oxygen-starved death; he frets when he finds it difficult to plant the American flag in the dusty lunar soil and imagines half a billion viewers laughing at his public humiliation; and he has to use a felt-tip pen as a circuit breaker when a switch breaks in the module. "We were human beings carrying out a very demanding task," he says.

"We had to improvise." That was the appeal of the Apollo missions: these crop-haired thirty-somethings dicing with death going somewhere no one else had been. Aldrin sees his role now as reactivating that spirit. He reckons we should go back to the moon, this time to develop it, and look to get to Mars in a couple of decades. "We have to take the new generation with us, so they can say that their generation participated." He'll try anything to reach that new generation: he writes children's books, is using Twitter (or Tweeter, as he calls it), and recently recorded a rap record called Rocket Experience with Snoop Dogg - one huge step for a man of a certain age. Aldrin holds nothing back when talking about how bad things were when he fell to earth in the early 70s.

He rejoined the US air force - he had been a fighter pilot - but his role as commander of a test pilot school didn't work out, he quit the armed services at 42, started drinking, had an affair, suffered depression, his marriage broke up, he went through another brief marriage, and eventually found himself selling Cadillacs (or, rather, not selling - he was a terrible salesman) in Beverly Hills and becoming dependent on drink. He outlines the reasons for his collapse in his somewhat convoluted Buzz-ese, but it's a perceptive self-analysis: "I inherited tendencies in different directions [depression and an addictive personality] and those directions, if you feed them with a life of perfection and discipline and then remove that all of a sudden, it's probably going to go back to some of the more deep-seated concerns about self-worth and achievement. You did that as part of a team; what are you doing now? You get a job as a car salesman and you're a horrible car salesman. What does that do to a person's ego." What he did was to get sober, marry again - this time for keeps - and re-engage with space.

It's no accident that Buzz Lightyear, the space ranger in animated film Toy Story, is named after Aldrin, who shares his limitless enthusiasm for exploration. Lucky, though, that Aldrin abandoned his real name, Edwin, preferring the nickname given by one of his two sisters, who said "buzzer" instead of "brother". Edwin Aldrin would just have been the second guy on the moon; Buzz Aldrin is the ur-spaceman, if not quite declaring, "To infinity and beyond", convinced that eventually we can get pretty close. • Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon (Bloomsbury, £16.99). Buzz Aldrin will be speaking tonight, 7.30pm, at the London Literature Festival, Royal Festival Hall, London SE1 Whatever happened to Neil Armstrong? Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, is intensely private and, in the eyes of the media, unforgivably normal. He is the JD Salinger of space exploration: the super-celebrity who shuns publicity. Having uttered the immortal line, "That's one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind," he hasn't felt the need to say anything significant since.

It was thought that Buzz Aldrin, as pilot of the lunar module, would be first out, but according to James Hansen's biography of Armstrong, existing practice was overturned because Nasa chiefs realised the first man on the moon would have to bear the burden of fame for a lifetime and preferred the undemonstrative, ego-free Armstrong. He retired from Nasa in 1971 to become professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati, where he remained until 1979. Since then he has held numerous corporate directorships and, uncharacteristically, appeared in an ad campaign for Chrysler (reportedly to help the ailing firm, rather than for the cash). He lives with his second wife on a farm in southern Ohio, suspicious of fans and autograph hunters since discovering in 2005 that his barber had sold some of his hair to a collector for $3,000.

In a speech to Congress on 25 May 1961, President Kennedy sets the goal of landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade Published: 1 Jul 2009 Forty years on from the first moon landing, we take you on a tour of the technical achievements, the cultural impact and the future of lunar exploration with our guest, Apollo 11's biggest fan, Christopher Riley Published: 5 Jul 2009 Footage shot just weeks before the moon landing shows Armstrong and Aldrin training in their cumbersome spacesuits Published: 2 Jul 2009 John Harris talks to Edgar Mitchell, Gene Cernan, and other alumni of the Apollo space missions Published: 1 Jul 2009 The Interesting Thing Buzz Aldrin Did on the Moon — and How an Atheist Might Be Behind You Not Seeing It – TheBlaze Tweet For those who don’t know, there’s a fascinating story surrounding Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin’s “secretive” activities in space. The second man to walk on the moon, Aldrin is also the first — and only known — individual to take Holy Communion.

The act, which has gained scattered coverage in the past, was both a coveted and a controversial one. Just before Aldrin stepped foot on the moon, he took the Eucharist, using wafers and a bottle of wine he brought into space from the Webster Presbyterian Church in Webster, Texas. Over the past decades since the 1969 moon landing, he has openly discussed the fascinating experience in detail. “I poured the wine into the chalice our church had given me. In the one-sixth gravity of the moon the wine curled slowly and gracefully up the side of the cup,” Aldrin told Guideposts Magazine in 1970. “It was interesting to think that the very first liquid ever poured on the moon, and the first food eaten there, were communion elements.” But this intriguing display, according to the Daily Mail , was purportedly kept secret by the U.S. government, despite plans that the astronaut originally had to broadcast the Christian act on radio.

See a dramatized version of his communion in the 1998 HBO miniseries, “From the Earth to the Moon,” below: NASA apparently decided not to allow Aldrin to showcase the sacrament, as Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the now-deceased founder of American Atheists, threatened to sue the U.S. government over a previous religious broadcast that apparently unfolded on Apollo 8, a separate vessel (Aldrin was on Apollo 11 for his moon mission). According to PBS , “She tried to prevent the reading of Genesis 8 on the Apollo space mission, arguing that the astronauts were government employees and thus prohibited from reading the Bible. (The Supreme Court declined jurisdiction.).” So the government was, thus, allegedly hesitant to allow Aldrin to broadcast the communion for fear that it would, again, rile O’Hair. The Guardian adds more about the famed atheist’s opposition to NASA personnel exhibiting overt faith on the job: After the Apollo 8 crew had read out the Genesis creation account in orbit, O’Hair wanted a ban on Nasa astronauts practising religion on earth, in space or “around and about the moon” while on duty. She believed it violated the constitutional separation between church and state.

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin displays a copy of his new book as he speaks at the launch of the PayPal Galactic initiative at the SETI institute in Mountain View, Calif., Thursday, June 27, 2013. The program aims to bring together leaders in the space industry working on the issues around the commercialization of space, including what currency will be used, how banking systems will adapt, managing risk and fraud, and customer support.Credit: AP While Americans didn’t hear the communion live as Aldrin had originally hoped, those at the Houston Space Center Mission Control were invited to join him in giving thanks as he read a section from the Book of John. “I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me, and I in him, will bear much fruit; for you can do nothing without me,” the astronaut read from a written card (John 15:5). Despite this great fanfare, Aldrin later wondered if Christian communion was the right move after all. While he said that it was incredibly fulfilling, in his memoir, “Magnificent Desolation,” he seemed to admit that it was, in a sense, divisive.

“Perhaps if I had it to do over again, I would not choose to celebrate communion,” he wrote. “Although it was a deeply meaningful experience for me, it was a Christian sacrament, and we had come to the moon in the name of all mankind—be they Christians, Jews, Muslims, animists, agnostics, or atheists.” However, he added, “But at the time I could think of no better way to acknowledge the enormity of the Apollo 11 experience than by giving thanks to God.” You can read more about the communion experience here . While it has been dubbed secretive in nature, it wasn’t entirely hidden from the public. That said, it was downplayed by the government and, as stated, was not broadcast live.

— Other Must-Read Stories: Buzz Aldrin - Biography - IMDb Buzz Aldrin Jump to: Overview (3) | Mini Bio (1) | Spouse (3) | Trivia (14) | Personal Quotes (8) Overview (3) 5' 10" (1.78 m) Mini Bio (1) Buzz Aldrin was born on January 20, 1930 in Montclair, New Jersey, USA as Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr. He is known for his work on The Other Side of the Moon (1990), Fly Me to the Moon 3D (2008) and Apollo 11: The Untold Story (2006). He was previously married to Lois Driggs Cannon, Beverly Van Zile and Jean Ann Archer. Spouse (3) ( 29 December 1954 - 1972) (divorced) (3 children) Trivia (14) Astronaut, second man on the moon. Aldrin's mother's maiden name was Moon. Had his first name legally changed to "Buzz" in 1979. Moonwalker.

Lunar Module Pilot, Apollo 11, making him the second man to walk on the Moon. Society of Operating Cameramen, (SOC) Recipient, Technical Achievment Award (1995) "NASA, First live television broadcast from the Moon" (1969). His Swedish ancestors were blacksmiths who emigrated to America from the province Värmland in Sweden. Inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2007 for his services to enterprise and space (inaugural election). Official induction ceremonies held in May 2008. In 2007, at age 77, he underwent plastic surgery for a face-lift. Claims that being subjected to countless bouts of G-force as a fighter pilot and astronaut caused his jowls to sag prematurely. Flew twice for NASA. Once on the first manned lunar expedition Apollo 11 with Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins and once on Gemini 12 with Jim Lovell , the last Gemini mission. On the historic Apollo 11 mission, the lunar module was Eagle and the command module was Columbia. Honorary member of the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC).

Jokingly credited in Monty Python's Flying Circus: The Buzz Aldrin Show (1970) as actor, writer and makeup artist. Received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 7021 Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street in Hollywood, California on January 14, 1993. His nickname "Buzz" originated in childhood. The younger of his two older sisters mispronounced 'brother' as 'buzzer', which was then shortened to 'Buzz'. Wrote a 2009 memoir "Magnificent Desolation," telling in detail his problems after his return from the moon with divorce, drinking, depression, and despair and checking into rehab in 1975 where he started the long climb back to sobriety and hope. Personal Quotes (8) [on joining Neil Armstrong in first walk on the moon, 20 July 1969] Beautiful! Beautiful! Magnificent desolation! [on why no famous photos were taken of Neil Armstrong during the Apollo 11 landing on the moon] As the sequence of lunar operations evolved, Neil had the camera most of the time, and the majority of pictures taken on the moon that include an astronaut are of me.

It wasn't until we were back on Earth and in the lunar receiving laboratory looking over the pictures that we realized there were few pictures of Neil. My fault, perhaps, but we had never simulated this in our training. There's a need for accepting responsibility - for a person's life and making choices that are not just ones for immediate short-term comfort. You need to make an investment, and the investment is in health and education. We can continue to try and clean up the gutters all over the world and spend all of our resources looking at just the dirty spots and trying to make them clean. Or we can lift our eyes up and look into the skies and move forward in an evolutionary way. I think humans will reach Mars, and I would like to see it happen in my lifetime. Mars is there, waiting to be reached. The torment of depression and the complications of addiction that accompany it affect millions, including myself and family members before me - my grandfather committed suicide before I was born and my mother the year before I went to the moon - along with hundreds of veterans who come to a similar fate each year," Aldrin wrote.

"As individuals and as a nation we need to be compassionate and supportive of all who suffer and give them the resources to face life. [on Robin Williams] I regarded Robin Williams as a friend and fellow sufferer. His passing is a great loss. The torment of depression and the complications of addiction that accompany it affect millions, including myself and family members before me - my grandfather committed suicide before I was born and my mother the year before I went to the moon - along with hundreds of veterans who come to a similar fate each year. As individuals and as a nation we need to be compassionate and supportive of all who suffer and give them the resources to face life. Robin Williams RIP. See also Buzz Aldrin Astronaut Apollo 11, Gemini 12 » Biography Biography A life of service and accomplishment Buzz Aldrin grew up in Montclair, New Jersey. His mother, Marion Moon, was the daughter of an Army Chaplain and his father Edwin Eugene Aldrin was an aviation pioneer. Buzz graduated one year early from Montclair High School and he attended the US Military Academy at West Point, graduating third in his class with a BS in mechanical engineering.

He then joined the Air Force where he flew F86 Sabre Jets in 66 combat missions in Korea, shot down two MIG-15′s, and was decorated with the Distinguished Flying Cross. After a tour of duty in Germany flying F100′s, he earned his Doctorate of Science in Astronautics at MIT and wrote his thesis on Manned Orbital Rendezvous. Selected by NASA in 1963 into the third group of astronauts, Aldrin was the first with a doctorate and became known as “Dr. Rendezvous.” The docking and rendezvous techniques he devised for spacecraft in Earth and lunar orbit became critical to the success of the Gemini and Apollo programs, and are still used today. He pioneered underwater training techniques to simulate spacewalking. In 1966 on the Gemini 12 orbital mission, Buzz performed the world’s first successful spacewalk – extra-vehicular activity (EVA), and set a new EVA record of 5 1⁄2 hours. During that mission he also took the first ‘selfie’ in space.

On July 20, 1969, Buzz and Neil Armstrong made their historic Apollo 11 moonwalk, becoming the first two humans to set foot on another world. An estimated 600 million people – at that time, the world’s largest television audience in history – witnessed this unprecedented heroic endeavor. Upon returning from the moon, Buzz was decorated with the Presidential Medal of Freedom and numerous awards all over the world. Named after Buzz are Asteroid “6470 Aldrin” and the “Aldrin Crater” on the moon. In 2011 along with his Apollo 11 crew mates Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins, he received the Congressional Gold Medal. Buzz is the author of 9 books, most recently his children’s book, Welcome to Mars: Making a Home on the Red Planet and his newest NY Times and Washington Post Bestseller, “No Dream Is Too High: Life Lessons from a Man Who Walked on the Moon”. Both published by National Geographic.

In October of 2014 he revamped his ShareSpace Foundation to be focused on STEAM Education – Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math to ignite the spark and fuel excitement for space in kids –Specifically for K-8. In August of 2015 he launched the Buzz Aldrin Space Institute at Florida Tech to promote and develop his vision of a permanent human settlement on the planet Mars. Since retiring from NASA and the U.S. Air Force, Col. Aldrin calls himself a Global Statesman for Space and has remained a tireless advocate for human space exploration. Buzz Aldrin - 必应 buzz aldrin 发表数：4 引用数：28 所在机构： Purdue University 关于buzz aldrin，网友们最关心的问题 答 -----------------------------------如有疑问欢迎追问. 巴兹·奥尔德林例句.Celebrities from actress ashley judd to astronaut buzz aldrin have revealed their struggleswith gloombuzz aldrin__RN_... Buzz Aldrin: John Glenn was a hero. We owe it to him to keep exploring space. buzz aldrin 巴茨.

阿尔得伦(人名); 巴兹奥尔德林 edwin eugene aldrin 艾尔卓恩 aldrine 氯甲桥萘 aldrim epoxidase 艾氏剂环氧酶 aldringen 阿尔德林根 aldriehine ... Buzz Aldrin (born Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr., January 20, 1930) is an American engineer and former astronaut. As the Lunar Module Pilot on Apollo 11, he was ... The Dark Side of the Moon | GQ The Dark Side of the Moon The Dark Side of the Moon By Pinterest He was a war-hero fighter pilot. He was an MIT rocket scientist. He was a lot of impressive things, and then Buzz Aldrin went to the moon, which is maybe all you know about one of the most famous men on earth—a guy who's been frozen, like a footprint in lunar dust, in America's mind for forty-five years now. But the thing about Buzz is that he still wants way more than the moon "So how was it? How was...the moon?" You have no further questions. Because he went to the moon.

And now he’s sitting here, at your table in a dark and crowded D.C. restaurant. It’s disorienting. The moon! The crescent and the eclipse, the waxing and the waning, the cheese—the lunar glow hanging right there, night after night on the periphery of your busy coming and going. No matter what your age, gender, politics, nationality, social or financial standing, every single person inhabiting the planet Earth has the same reaction to him. Holy crap, Buzz Aldrin, you went to the moon! You smile at him, your face opening the way every single face in the entire world opens when it encounters him. Because he is: Buzz Aldrin. And we are: mankind. He takes note of your smile, and just as quickly looks past you. It’s the same way with everybody. It’s your pregnant anticipation: I can’t wait to hear the amazing synthesis of moon wisdom you are about to bestow upon me. He has no idea what to do with that. None. He’s turning 85 this month. He went to the moon when he was 39. Mankind has been coming at him with your same smile ever since. What do you expect him to do with that?

He orders the veal. He’s wearing a lapel pin of his famous moon footprint in miniature, cast in pewter. He’s wearing a tan corduroy jacket, a tie with pictures of planets all over it. He’s wearing bracelets, big beads. Turquoise on one wrist and a string of translucent alien faces or something on the other. "And all of a sudden here’s a rocket," he’s saying, his voice low and gravelly, as he tries to make plain what landing on the moon can do to a man’s life. "And you’re gonna get on top of it and go somewhere. People are interested. People want to be able to put down in writing something about how you were feeling." He gesticulates when he talks, the bracelets clattering. "Look, we didn’t know what we were feeling. We weren’t feeling." The jewelry is distracting. There is more. A gigantic double watch, two faces fused together like heads on conjoined twins. There are gold rings, a moon, a star, diamonds, a pinkie ring, many rings. What is up with the jewelry? It’s confusing. Wait, jewelry? Never mind all that. You have no idea what to do with all that.

His jewelry, your pregnant smile, the distance between you and him is a chasm and you don’t know how you feel about that. Imagine how he feels about that. He doesn’t know how he feels. He’s been feeling this way ever since he came back, fell spectacularly out of the sky in July of 1969, splashed into the Pacific in an airtight capsule with his Apollo 11 crewmates Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins. He’s a museum piece. He’s a mascot—for Team Universe. He talks in very long paragraphs about rocket science. Orbits and going to Mars and the "Aldrin Mars Cycler." He holds three patents for things like a modular space station, and he started a foundation devoted to advancing space education. "But this is not what you want to talk about," he thankfully says, and so you say let’s get back to that day you went to the moon. It was a moment for the world, a particular historic moment when scientific, military, and nationalistic interests intersected perfectly—and him and Neil and Mike blasting off atop a Saturn V as if in celebration of that perfect union. And doesn’t he have a perspective on that? A way of thinking about that?

"It’s something we did," he says. "Now we should do something else." (You feel like an idiot. You feel like you’re asking Mona to offer insights into the Mona Lisa.) He’s a relic of the twentieth century, a snapshot of American glory—of human achievement—living right here in your same life span. He’s a picture in every history book in every language in every country of the world, and every single human being who even thinks about him has the same question. "How was it? How was...the moon? What did it feel like to go to the moon?" He came back burdened. By what he did, and what he didn’t do. Significantly burdened. Suicidal. His grandfather, a bullet through the brain. His mom swallowed pills. Moon or no moon, that’s in his blood. "There was some genetic association," he says. "My grandfather had committed suicide, and then my mother did right before we went to the moon." Abruptly he switches subjects, talks rockets and boosters. Orbits. His comfort zone. "And now Obama says he wants to send a human to an asteroid. Why would he say that? I’ll tell you why he said that. To satisfy the public.

To show progress. But that’s not going to the moon. That’s not going to Mars. That’s playing around with a Mickey Mouse rock. We’ve got to get rid of that. I’m the creator of a new way to get to Mars." He takes a sip of his soda. He hasn’t had a drink in thirty-six years. He’s got his chair positioned against the wall, his shoulders open and relad, his round blue eyes busy and alert. "My mind might wander a little bit," he says, surveying the room. "I’m on the scout for cute-looking ladies, being divorced a couple of years now." Someone turns the music up. The speaker is not far from his knee. "THIS IS USUALLY QUITE A SHOWPLACE," he says over the beat. "The melancholy of all things done" is the way Buzz once described his complete mental breakdown after returning from the moon. Booze. A couple of divorces. A psych ward. Broke. At one point he was selling cars. Neither Neil Armstrong nor Michael Collins had a mental breakdown after returning from the moon.

The public pressure was never as great on Mike; he was up orbiting the moon in the command module while Neil and Buzz puttered off in the Eagle and then gently touched down on the Sea of Tranquillity. Neil was of course the first to open the hatch, the first man to walk on the moon. He would go on to retire from space with dignity, people said. He turned into a buttoned-up academic, and then a businessman, honorably testifying before Congress about space exploration when called, and turning down just about every media request coming his way, turning down biography offers from people like James Michener. He sued Hallmark Cards for using his name and a recording of his "one small step" quote for a Christmas ornament. Buzz was of course the second man to walk on the moon. Buzz made a rap video, "Rocket Experience," with Snoop Dogg. He did the cha-cha and the fox-trot and was eliminated in the second round of season ten of Dancing with the Stars.

He has appeared on WWE Monday Night Raw, The Price Is Right, Space Ghost Coast to Coast, 30 Rock, The Big Bang Theory, The Simpsons, Futurama, Top Chef, and many dozens of other shows and movies as himself. He has written eight books, mostly about his own exploits in space, including four memoirs, two science fiction books, and a children’s book. He sells "get your ass to mars" T-shirts on his website, along with $600 Buzz Aldrin "First Step" autographed lithographs. The second man to walk on the moon. Number two. When Neil died in 2012, the White House issued a statement saying he was "among the greatest of American heroes—not just of his time, but of all time." Recently Buzz had a hard time getting anyone at the White House to answer his calls about maybe doing a ceremony or something to commemorate the forty-fifth anniversary of his moon walk. (Eventually they pulled a little something together.) He drives a zippy red 2014 M3 with the roof open to the California sun. He’s hugging tight to the bumper of a silver Chevy in front of him that will not move, his engine growling.

He wears a pair of glasses over his sunglasses, and a blue NASA ball cap with red flames on the sides. He pulls around the Chevy with one quick motion and only inches to spare, nearly rams into a Camry, so he veers left, and with nothing now in the way he floors it, the sudden burst pitching his body back. Seventy miles an hour, eighty miles an hour down L.A.’s 405, zigging and zagging like a fighter pilot shooting down two Soviet MiG-15’s, which incidentally he once did, from the cockpit of an F-86 Sabre in Korea. At the end of the exit ramp, he exhales. "Pretty good instrumentation," he says, looking at the dashboard of the M3. "It says fifty-one miles until I run out of gas. That would have been handy to have in an airplane." He demonstrates the paddle shift. "I could recommend some modifications." Incidentally, regarding the glasses he’s wearing, his eye doctor does not know his business thoroughly, he thinks. "I need to create a device to overcome a defect in the lens housing." Also, the wristwatch industry has never fully capitalized on quartz.

"But that goes back to 1970, and I told Bulova—" His fingers are all bent outward, like wings. His cuff links are tiny American flags. He is a man who studies and invents. He has always been this way. He got the nickname Buzz when he was a kid, from his sister who called him "buzzer" because she couldn’t pronounce "brother." There was already one Edwin in the family, and that was his dad. The family lived in Montclair, New Jersey, and his mother’s maiden name was Moon, and yes, he knows how crazy that is. The melancholy ran in the Moon side of the family. His dad, a career military man, an early aviation man, cast a long shadow. His dad knew one of the Wright brothers, and Amelia Earhart, and took a transatlantic flight on the goddamn Hindenburg before it blew up. Buzz was the youngest, the only boy, small, shy, awkward, and sensitive. His father wanted him to be brave and brilliant. So Buzz drove himself to become what his father wanted. Sheer will. West Point, fighter pilot, decorated war hero. "And?" his father said.

After Korea, Buzz came home and got a doctorate in rocket science from MIT. It was the extreme sport of science, and Buzz found himself luxuriating in the learning and the language. "A rendezvous guidance technique, designed to extend man’s control capabilities," he wrote in his 1963 doctoral thesis, seemingly fully in command of this point, "is derived, whereby, through a sight reticle programmed to vary inertially for a selected exact nominal Keplerian trajectory, the astronaut can initiate, monitor and correct his intercept...." That kind of lingo got him an invitation to join NASA, to go up in a rocket ship, for the first time in 1966 in Gemini XII, when he went out of the rocket ship, went floating out in space to find out how long a human could survive without dying—the longest space walk ever attempted. Buzz calculated ways to avoid wasted muscle energy by applying his scuba-diving training to the challenge. He beat the record handily, staying outside the capsule for two hours and twenty-nine minutes—then he went out twice more. Then came Apollo 11, and he walked on the moon. "The second man to walk on the moon?" his father said.

"Number two?" Sheer will. In his sports car, Buzz’s knuckles on the steering wheel are white. The double-headed watch hangs loosely off his wrist as if unsure of its own point. The California sunshine lends a glow to the alien-head bracelet and makes the aliens’ red eyes sparkle. "Yeah, I sort of like to be on the unique side of life," Buzz says. "Or I don’t mind it. Yeah, it gets lonesome." He’s not sure about his glasses, removes the outer pair. "If I wear lenses, my eyes aren’t going to train to fix the problem," he says. "The muscles are just going to get lazy." You should always be improving yourself, he thinks, never sit idle. Never. After the moon, Buzz cracked up. There was nothing left to do. The media frenzy was worldwide; twenty-four countries in forty-five days—and that was just the beginning. NASA clearly had no further use for him in space; now he was just supposed to be some kind of NASA PR flack. He resigned from NASA in 1971 and returned to the Air Force. It didn’t seem like the Air Force knew what to do with someone who had been to the moon.

He was an outsider, the egghead from academia who’d just tumbled off the speakers’ circuit. He drank a lot. His marriage to the mother of his three children fell apart, and he retired from the Air Force. He went to rehab. He got married again, but that lasted a year. He drank a lot more, fell in love a lot more. His Air Force pension wasn’t much. That was when he started at the Cadillac dealership. He sucked at selling cars. Rehab was the first time he ever really talked about feelings. It turned out he had so many feelings. An emptiness so deep. He discovered the melancholy of all things done. He was in his forties, a conqueror with nothing left to conquer but his own demons. The second man to walk on the moon. Number two. His father never accepted the fact that Buzz was not number one. Grasping, his father waged an unsuccessful one-man campaign to get the U.S. Postal Service to change its Neil Armstrong "First Man on the Moon" commemorative stamp to one that said "First Men on the Moon" so it could include Buzz. As for Buzz’s mental breakdown, his depression and alcoholism, his father never accepted that, either.

Or if he did, he blamed the moon, the absence of gravity, the unknown physical properties of space. The moon must have ruined Buzz. Buzz turns the car with precision into the parking lot of his apartment building, coming to an abrupt stop. "Radio off," he says, fixing his gaze on the dashboard, pushing the button. "Top up." Check. "Seat belt off." Check. "Hat off." Check. "Neutral." Check. He thinks. Anything else? "Sunglasses off." He looks in the mirror. "Somebody says I look pretty good in lenses," he says. "And that’s part of my game, too." Glasses on. Christina, his manager and "mission control director," comes out to meet him. She’s tall, early forties, a strong Amazon type with blonde hair and super-thick eyelashes. She used to work for John Tesh and before that was a backup singer for Ringo Starr. She is terrified of driving with Buzz and so she never does. They bicker. Buzz has had three wives, and after the last one, Lois, things were a real mess. Christina now acts as a bouncer for all of the gold diggers trying to pry themselves into chez Buzz.

Not that there’s very much in the way of gold. Christina accompanies Buzz on his appearances, stands in the back waving her arms, telling Buzz to stay on topic. Or wrap it up. Mostly: Wrap it up. She has been working for Buzz for six years and never expected to stay this long. At one point, a few years ago, she was starting a family and wanted to move on with her life. But when she saw what was happening to Buzz, what the relationship with Lois was doing to him, her heart wouldn’t let her walk away. He climbs with no trouble up and out of the car. He is fit and tan and short. He can’t find his phone. "Where’s my thermos?" He’s a little ADD. "I can’t turn the damn thing off," he says, referring to the car. That is one button he could not locate. Christina leans in, yanks here and there on the dashboard; she has no idea how to work the ignition on an M3, but it can’t be that hard. His license plate is marsguy. Lois was moongal. "Okay, Buzz, come on up," Christina says.

"Rob figured out a way to shorten the presentation." "I don’t want it shorter," he says. "They’re only giving you thirty minutes, Buzz." "Well, don’t re-arrange my slides," he says. "We had to re-arrange the slides, Buzz," she says. Upstairs in the apartment, Rob, his personal assistant who also refuses to drive with Buzz, is re-arranging the slides. It’s a modest home with a sprawling view of West L.A. and leather couches and dark walls tidily decorated with Buzz memorabilia. Fox News stays on the big screen. A coffee-table book, Marketing the Moon, lies on top of a glass case displaying some of Buzz’s medals and a signed photograph of him and Mike and Neil. Buzz had a much fancier apartment down the street when he was married to Lois, but now Lois has that one, and she also has a lot of Buzz’s moon stuff, which Christina and Rob would like to help Buzz get back. Lois was supposed to be the one. Lois propped Buzz up after rehab in the late 1980s.

"The fuel of love was pretty much sending Lois and me into the stratosphere," he writes in "Every Superman Needs His Lois," just one of multiple chapters devoted to Lois in one of his books. "Lois took me on as her one-person challenge to rebuild my sense of self. Whenever I got down on myself, she wrote more notes to me, page after page, telling me how brilliant, physically attractive, creative, and innovative I was...she sat close to me and read her notes aloud." They married in 1988. Buzz had his three grown children from his first marriage, and Lois had two. Lois was a banker’s daughter, worth millions. Buzz was never a big-money guy. He was a pay-the-bills-on-time guy. But with Lois’s money they were living the high life—plenty of fancy parties in L.A. But all of that disappeared in 1989 with the collapse of the savings-and-loan industry. For the first time in her life she had to figure out how to make money, and the most obvious thing to sell was: Buzz.

"My petite little platinum blonde beauty of a wife suddenly turned into a public-relations dynamo," Buzz would later write proudly of his wife. " ’The business is Buzz!’ she proclaimed, and indeed so it became." He went on every talk show imaginable—all over the world. She turned down virtually nothing. He made none of the choices. He imagined himself promoting space, doing something good for the world and the future of mankind. He did what Lois told him to do, and now they were raking in millions, endorsement deals with Louis Vuitton, Tommy Hilfiger, Apple, Grundig, Nike. Buzz emerges from the kitchen with a bowl of berries and a protein shake in his Dancing with the Stars souvenir mug. He sits at the computer with Rob and Christina and tries to persuade them to undo the way they re-arranged the slides for this afternoon’s keynote speech, "Buzz Aldrin’s Unified Space Vision," at the International Space Development Conference at the Sheraton Gateway Hotel in Los Angeles. Why did they have to go and re-arrange his damn slides? Buzz: "Okay, now look. This is wrong. And this, which is wrong. And this, which is wrong! It shows too much of the solar dynamic.

It doesn’t make the point. And we want the node to clearly show. And the two halves. So it will cement in their minds." Christina: "I know that’s super logical in your mind, but Buzz—you won’t have time for all of this. It’s a thirty-minute speech." When Christina came along, it was to help with the business. She’d answered an ad in the Hollywood Reporter, and it was just a job. At night she would come home to her husband and say, "I don’t feel good about this" and "Some of the stuff I’m seeing doesn’t seem right." He would say, "Stay out of it." She would say, "Believe me, I’m trying." One day Buzz came to Christina and said, "I need you to look into my bank accounts." She said, "Buzz, I can’t." He said Lois was always bragging about all this money they were making. "But I don’t see the benefit of it." Buzz wanted to help his son Mike. Mike was going down the same path as Buzz. Mike was the black sheep of the family, never fit in.

Buzz did not understand the problem, but he never turned his back on Mike and neither did Andy, Buzz’s other son, or Janice, his daughter. Buzz wanted money to help Mike, and Lois kept saying they didn’t have any. "Yet somehow I’m paying her kid’s salary?" Buzz groused to Christina. Christina said, "Buzz, you have every right to go to your accountants and ask them to look at your own bank accounts." Lois fired Christina in 2011 and kicked Buzz out and changed all the locks on the doors. Buzz hired Christina back, and together with his kids he’s been rebuilding. Women keep swooping in, tell Buzz how handsome he is, and Buzz gets enamored, and Christina says: "No." But the women keep coming. Like everyone else in the world, women like to reach out and touch Buzz. It’s some kind of natural human reaction to the man who walked on the moon. It’s maybe like touching the moon. Or it’s just the intoxicating allure of fame. And he’s a cute old man, kind of wacky, thoroughly accessible in that way—and somehow it seems okay to walk up and hug him.

And when pretty women do that, especially pretty women with large breasts, well, Buzz takes it personally. He takes it seriously. He falls in love easily. Christina is his shield. She wants him to slow down, to stop with the ladies, to stop feeling like he has to fly to friggin’ Dubai to give a speech, but she knows he’s incapable of stopping either. Forward momentum is the antidote to madness. He learned that a long time ago. Christina: "It’s a thirty-minute speech, Buzz. They’re only giving you thirty minutes." Buzz: "I’m not going to explain each slide. I’m just going to say look at how easy this is to read." Christina: "What? How easy what is to read?" He clicks on the "Unified Space Vision (U.S.) Civil Space Missions" slide, a graph of red and green and blue with arrows and labels: Testbed to ISS, Phobos Recon, MEV to CSS, M-Ph Landing Site, 3 Crew MEV Return.

Christina: "I look at that and that’s, like, chaos." Rob: "It’s pretty hard to just sit there and read that." Christina: "The normal person is not—just no, Buzz." Buzz: "But people need to know!" Christina: "You cannot have a grid like that." Buzz: "Please just do what I say." At the Sheraton, fans are circling. Five teenagers from India in black suits and matching red ties wait to capture Buzz’s attention; he’s in the back at a fold-up table still arguing with Christina about the slides as they prep for the speech. A middle-aged man in a tight Star Trek shirt waits for Buzz. A former girlfriend of Buzz’s brazenly goes in for a hug. Two girls in sexy space suits have given up waiting for Buzz; they position themselves with Buzz in the background and snap selfies. The crowd in the ballroom is mostly science fiction types, a smattering of elderly engineers, kids with school projects, and says a lot about the degree to which the National Space Society, which has been holding the conference for thirty-three years, is feeling its age.

On the one hand, superhero tech entrepreneur Elon Musk will make an appearance to accept an award, and on the other hand, tonight in the California Ballroom the "Space Is Sexy!" party will be held. All weekend long, speakers at the conference extol the promise of "building a spacefaring civilization," and the crowd cheers, revival-meeting style. It’s an aching. For a day when space was cool. When people—humanity—wanted to go there. Not just a couple of billionaires on a joy ride. It’s hard to even remember when human spaceflight was part of pop culture. It’s hard to even remember Tang. When MTV debuted in 1981, they used a photo of Buzz standing on the moon saluting the American flag. They superimposed the network logo over the flag. A mash-up. Space was retro—in the 1980s. If there’s an appetite to return to the moon, or push on to Mars, it’s not in the twenty-first-century vernacular. NASA retired the Space Shuttle program in 2011. The so-called Constellation Program to get back to the moon by 2020—a Bush-administration plan—was canceled.

In 2010, Obama called for missions that go beyond low Earth orbit, including the asteroid mission by 2025 and a manned mission to Mars before 2040. "Our goal is no longer just a destination to reach," Obama said. "Our goal is the capacity for people to work and learn, and operate and live safely beyond the earth for extended periods of time." But an entire presidential term and a half has gone by with virtually no further mention of Mars. The inaction, the lack of motivation, the utter lack of imagination, is what bothers Buzz. Let’s go to Mars! To him it’s as primal as scuba diving, his one and only hobby besides space—and women. (This per Christina.) Any infant learning to crawl knows that exploration is the driving force behind the whole gig. Primal. The Buzz Aldrin Unified Space Vision is Buzz’s plan to get human beings to Mars by the year 2032. And he’s here in the Grand Ballroom about to tell the crowd all about it, sitting at the fold-up table with his PowerPoint, still arguing with Christina about the slides. Maybe she could resize the font. Magnify the images. Can this whole thing go down?

If you could remove the title, you could make it full-screen. That won’t make any difference, Buzz. Just go straight to the messy chart. Please don’t call it the messy chart, Christina. People are eating their salads, Buzz. There’s no more time. He reaches for his jacket draped over a chair, stuff falls out, pens, an electric razor clunking to the floor. Where’s my laser pointer? In the side there. Is that my phone? Did I bring both phones? The guy at the podium says Buzz needs no introduction. The crowd cheers stadium-loud as Buzz walks up. He waves. He beams. He’s charming and quirky—the little old man with the bracelets rattling, cracking jokes Bob Hope-style, or maybe more like a cross between Merv Griffin and Joe Biden. They present him with a thank-you gift, a pewter moon trophy, and when he takes it he looks out into the audience, ducking his head to avoid the glare, and calls, "Christina, don’t I already have one of these?" (Yes, Lois has it.) He tells the crowd why we should go to Mars, and for a while you can follow. But not for long.

He shows the slides, and they’re not helping much. "Okay, now, this chart shows two synodic periods, it’s pretty complicated, but this is the one that’s going to show it in motion. This is going to blow your mind. It’s really quite fantastic when you see it in motion. No, we’re not going out there. Hold my horsepowers!" Twenty minutes in, Christina starts her hand motions. Wrap it up, Buzz. It would be a lot easier if he just had a canned presentation, a little motivational speaking for the people, dream the impossible dream, reach for the stars—normal hero stuff. But that is not Buzz. He is a man of science. He has important space concepts to share, beseeching mankind to understand. He’s delivering the speech he would to serious space-minded politicians and science foundations thirty years ago, but now the audience has morphed into Trekkies and Star Wars hobbyists. For the record, when it comes to Mars, Buzz knows what he’s talking about. Orbital mechanics was his thing at MIT. Orbital mechanics is the beautiful science of how artificial objects move through space. He became something of a savant on the topic.

Think about hitting a golf ball off the rim of a hole. The ball zooms around the rim, then quickly glances off in another direction. There’s an equation that explains that. Similarly, when a spacecraft approaches a planet, it can zip around the planet and fling off in another direction. There are equations to explain that "gravitational slingshot," too. It’s how we’ve gotten probes to Saturn and Venus and Mars, and Buzz had a lot to do with it. His MIT doctoral thesis was an orbital-mechanics lovefest that NASA ended up incorporating into its standard operating procedures. Then, in 1985, Buzz proposed a beautiful equation to the scientific community that showed how we could slingshot our way to Mars, as if on a highway, except you don’t need much fuel because you’re flinging in and out of orbits. Scientists calculated and confirmed it. Buzz called it the Aldrin Cycler. He has equations and slides to explain all this. He’s an equation man who feels an obligation to be a man of the people. A translator. A space-science ambassador who will get people excited about these concepts, get people to commit resources, to get people to Mars.

But he is, in the end, still an equation man. Soaring rhetoric is not his thing. Thirty minutes in, Christina’s swirling her wrists and mouthing, TIME TIME TIME! "Now. Here. This is the slide I wanted. Obviously the earth’s orbit is in blue, Mars orbit is in red. And the transfer is in green. And then it shows a number of orbits, an orbit and a half that goes by Mars." Forty-five minutes in, Christina is up at the stage. "Christina tells me I have to go," he says to the crowd. "Um, remember to follow me on Twitter @TheRealBuzz." The applause is all generosity and relief. And then people rush to him, swarm him for autographs, pictures, selfies, or just to reach out and touch his shoulder. "I love how you gesticulate!" a blonde woman with a tight V-neck sweater says to him. "The way you move your hands, it’s so beautiful," she says, reaching out to touch him. "Oh, my God, such strong shoulders!" So why, anyway, was Buzz second? Why didn’t he get to be the first man to walk on the moon?

Urban legend has it that NASA planned for Buzz to go first but then at some point decided it would be Neil Armstrong instead because Neil, a less excitable guy, would handle the fame better. People who subscribe to the theory point out that NASA got it right; look how much better Neil handled his life. But then again, we never got to find out how Neil would have ended up if he were number two. A more likely explanation begins with the fact that Buzz was supposed to be the first man to walk on the moon. That’s how they practiced it, because that’s how NASA did things back then: The commander drove and the pilot did the space walk. Neil, the senior o&#x221E;cer, was the commander and so naturally he would stay in the driver’s seat while Buzz, the pilot, opened the hatch and got out. But there was a hitch in the plan. The hatch itself. It was in front of the astronauts, on the floor. It hinged inward, so you had to pull it open. The hinges were on Buzz’s side, so it swung toward him, blocking him. Neil had the clear path out, not Buzz.

And no, you couldn’t trade positions; the lunar module was about the size of a pup tent and the walls were thin as Reynolds Wrap, so you had to be careful not to...lean on it. Once Neil was out, Buzz had to close the hatch, move over to Neil’s side, and then reopen it to get out. To the rest of the world it didn’t seem to matter much who was number one and who was number two, certainly not in the beginning. A half-billion people watched Neil and Buzz walk on the moon, the world’s largest television audience in history, and afterward there were parades around the world to welcome Neil, Buzz, and Mike back to the planet. Buzz’s mom probably killed herself because she couldn’t take the media glare. Maybe that put her over the edge. That’s the way Buzz always figured it. The frenzied attention had started long before blastoff. Her son was picked to walk on the moon! She had long been suffering from depression, lived in seclusion. She had tried with pills before. This time the pills worked. Buzz’s father denied the suicide. He persuaded the coroner to say she died of a heart attack. How was it? How was the moon?

What did it feel like to go to the moon? It felt like: second.

Question: What is second man on the moon, Buzz Aldrin's real Christian name?
Answer: EDWIN